In doing some research for an article I'm looking for any anecdotes of a situation where a Firefighter has been seriously injured while wearing standard full "Turn Out Gear" including or not including Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA).

I'm specifically interested in situations where the Firefighter has sustained an obvious complex long bone/spinal/C-Spine injury or where he/she has sustained a serious mechanism of injury that would indicate the likelihood of such an injury. A fall from a roof or through a floor etc. something where there was a definite force injury potential with acceleration / deacceleration issues of where it was easily seen that there were severely angulated fractures and the like.

I'm looking for cases where the Turn Out Gear was STILL in place and needed to be removed in an emergent fashion for EMS to treat this Firefighter on scene or if that was not possible how did you deal with the injures discussed above with the Turn Out Gear in place? I am most interested in cases where the Turn Out Gear was removed on scene and if so HOW it was removed given the scenario so as not to exacerbate the known or possible injuries.

Also, if you have ever discussed or trained for this in some way I'd be interested in that information as well.

If anyone has such a story I'd like to know as much information about how you dealt with this situation and the outcome in as much detail as possible.

Please feel free to E-Mail me off list at LNMolino@aol.com if you can assist me.

Replies to This Discussion

You may take a look at the NIST (http://www.nist.gov/index.html) site. They have done a lot of accident investigations of the type of situations you describe. I do not know if all reports are available on line but we have used them through direct conversations and found very good (and sometimes long winded) studies and investigations. They have a ton of information.
Mike